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Mentorship August 5, 2022
How do you teach science-minded creatives soft skills training? The answers arrive in the stories we share.
ENTITY Academy’s Writer’s Collective+, in collaboration with UCLA Extension, upscales its soft skills training approach to an entirely new level with its quality and design.
ENTITY Academy is one-of-a-kind in class. The Academy offers (but is not limited to) a variety of tech and writing-based opportunities to women in Data Science, Software Development, Cybersecurity, and Digital Marketing.
ENTITY Founder and CEO, Jennifer Schwab, has taken a dream of hers and not only upscaled but upskilled it to the following levels by design. Her metrics are straightforward, “In the workforce, hard skills are what land you a job, but it is soft skills that will help you thrive once you start working,” she said.
It’s not the marketing education that keeps ENTITY in a class of its own; it’s the type of leadership training and the staff that Schwab keeps. With a refusal to compromise her values and a passion for never falling short on helping those with a deep desire to share their stories, she repeatedly goes to bat for the underdog.
She has created in her list of programs for mentors and mentees alike opportunities for “Fireside Chats” with industry leaders from across the world. These include artists, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, political activists, actors and actresses, CEOs, and leaders of every design and build you can imagine.
Sound incredible? I haven’t even gotten to the bread and butter. That’s right, there’s more. Schwab has hand-picked a team of full-time mentors that is powerful and hands-on with a willingness to help each student.
When we think about the stories we hold close that define who we are, we recognize how powerful they can become. We all know the power that a story can hold in our life to transform, change, and propel us. Outstanding, compelling story writing has shifted the minds and hearts of humanity since the parietal art of the ancient world.
If you think back hard enough, you can probably remember a book, story, or theme with surmounting influence, possibly even creating a backdrop or building block upon which your life would take on greater meaning.
What happens, however, when our stories suddenly shift? What do we do when the unexpected happens? How can someone thrive in a world where they don’t possess the skills to navigate it?
Enter ENTITY Academy. A shining hope for women’s future in a world where stories can change and where they often do change. How do we build resiliency to the ever-changing and challenging world around us? The answer is soft skills training.
Soft skills relate to HOW you work. In fact, you probably have many of these skills and don’t even realize it. However, many of the soft skills that employers are looking for on resumes don’t always come easily to everyone.
In a world that is tough (on a good day), being kind, adaptable, optimistic, and self-motivated is tiring enough to make me want to go back to bed some days. #justbeingreal
According to Forbes Magazine, “Soft skills — such as empathy, emotional intelligence, kindness, mindfulness, adaptability, integrity, optimism, self-motivation, grit, and resilience — have become crucial success factors” in the growing workplace.
The reason for this is that they cannot be replicated by machines. Forbes also reports that, “Soft skill-intensive occupations will account for two-thirds of all jobs by 2030,” and that hiring employees with more soft skills could, “increase revenue by more than $90,000.”
Now before all of you Napoleon Dynamites put your nunchucks into the closet and call it a day, take a look into what career expert Tom Gerencer says about the importance of owning hard skills vs soft skills on a resumé.
He explains that it’s not enough to say you have these skills on your resumé. You have to show potential employers that you actually own these skill sets.
Gerencer’s method is flawless, and one that is taught by anyone with a mentoring coach leading them towards success in today’s job market crunch. He says to look at the job’s description and see if they need any of the hard or soft skills you possess. Then, creatively use synonyms that adequately and honestly describe who you are.
Let’s be clear; there will be no fooling a future employer. Not even Napoleon Dynamite can dance his way around the screening process of a solid employer with ugly lies on a skill set list. You’ll soon be dancing your way to the unemployment office if you do.
By including soft skills coaching in the curriculum, Schwab clearly sets up ENTITY Academy mentees for success as they go through their hard skills training.
For instance, the Writer’s Collective+ program I took part in was a literal one-stop-shop that helped us hone our writing, learn search engine optimization (SEO) practices, and adapt them to create effective marketing campaigns for any company.
We collaborated with UCLA Extension Professor Jenny McCoy for a course in Multi-Platform Digital Marketing. In the class, we learned about setting up campaigns across several platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+. We built mock campaigns and presented a final project focusing on a real Fortune 500 company of our choosing, learning how to analyze results and make necessary changes.
Schwab has put in place a creative mentorship program that is a meeting of the minds for science-based thinkers (left-brained), creatives (right-brained), and everyone in between (me?).
In a newly-designed soft skills coaching program, mentees can join weekly workshops for participation and group interaction.
Goal Setting: Set goals that help you. This workshop teaches us to change our behaviors and create focus. We also learned about ways to prevent ourselves from sabotaging our own goals, which happens more often than you’d think.
Time Management: Aka, the process of organizing your time between all the things necessary to you. It helps with feelings of balance, understanding why we genuinely feel overwhelmed, and finally, it leaves the mentee with feelings of empowerment to help work smarter, not more demanding.
Positive Self-Talk: Like any business being only as good as its weakest link, we can only rise as high as our inner dialogue and self-talk will allow us. We discuss the “Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz. How we use our words is fundamentally pivotal in our everyday exchanges and can set the course for our future life.
Growth Mindset: Our approach and fundamental beliefs surrounding success and failure are essential. Knowing that we have the capability for change and growth is one of the most potent assets a person can own. Many companies would rather see their employee try and fail, fostering awareness, than only rely on successes without growth.
Self-Care and Stress Management: We all know that we need to take care of ourselves. But do we actually do it? #thestruggleisreal.
I am an ENFJ (an Artemis), or so I just found out, which means I am the world’s worst at putting myself first. If you would like to find out what you are, take ENTITY’s fun little quiz.
Self-Compassion: Ever heard of self-love? Forgiving yourself? Easier said than done! This workshop also trains mentees on kindness, empathy, and emotional resilience.
Creating Forgiveness: Working through resentment. We have ALL been mistreated, in and out of the working world. We have done it to each other and ourselves. Resentment is understandable, but it can sabotage our lives when not dealt with in healthy ways.
This is one of the most powerful lessons Ayana taught in this course by far. Understanding forgiveness and recognizing the truth show us that holding on to resentment affects our health, states of mind, and the people around us.
It’s about taking responsibility for your actions and making the choice to heal. There is power and freedom in forgiveness.
Effective Communication: Arguably, effective communication is one of the most important skills we can possess. Startling research shows that more people lose their jobs from poor communication (soft-skills training) than anything else (like inadequate hard skills knowledge).
Healthy Body-Healthy Mind: A healthy body, meaning taking care of your body’s physical systems and watching what you eat, contributes to how your mind works. Understanding that everything is interconnected and our choices directly affect our outcomes is pivotal to our success.
Ayana Labossiere Burks is the lead coach for the soft skills training program. She is the person you want to sign up with for counseling sessions and is the “counselor on hand” in emergencies. She is fiercely loved across the company and always in high demand.
In my weeks of experience seeing how Labossiere Burks worked her soft skills coaching techniques, I sensed a repeating theme of social engagement and relating to her audience through narrative.
These narratives (or stories) allow the audience to engage and explore their psychological effects – cognitive, behavioral, and therapeutic – using social engagement and simple technologies to build resilience and creativity.
Creativity allows workers to bring fresh ideas to the table as they carry out tasks for their employers. Agility, flexibility, and adaptability are among the leading skill sets. When you build adaptability and resilience, you challenge yourself to be comfortable in unfamiliar environments and situations.
The difference is that Labossiere Burks can do this in such a comfortable, meaningful way that it becomes a powerful driver of change towards the self-efficacy we all need as a tool to survive in today’s changing world.
She empowers her community to see from different perspectives, both on an emic scale, allowing each individual time to share their personal experiences. There is also an etic perspective for the group, as they relate these experiences to their own lives with empathy and understanding through dialogue and text.
As I began to interact more freely with the team at ENTITY and become increasingly more comfortable, the soft-skills approach and lessons I was learning along with the writing processes began to help open up parts of myself that had not been shared in months, maybe even years.
I quickly found myself evolving from someone that had suffered from a post-traumatic stress syndrome event to someone observable as a post-traumatic growth opportunity.
The months and months of hard work I had been putting into myself by investing in a culture of gratitude and forgiveness finally paid off, as my sense of community and social engagement started to thrive again.
I feel a close connectedness back to the most authentic nature of who I am as a woman more than ever because of the lessons in narratives and the effective use of stories combined with the tools that ENTITY Academy has to offer.
There is no doubt that Jennifer Schwab has the right idea within her target and approach for women’s sustainable future in business. Her personal narrative speaks of sparking creativity, pushing her story of resilience, and causing disruption.
She hasn’t stated this, but I have this quote on my refrigerator that reminds me of her:
Well behaved women seldom make history
Laurel thatcher ulrich
Schwab isn’t about to let anyone get in her way. She’s here to pave a clear path so that other women of any age can create theirs.
I will speak for all of us who are graduating today (100% graduation rate) and say that we are so grateful for the soft skills coaching we received at ENTITY Academy.
